It’s far too early for us to talk about results, but I can say that our first four participants have been very enthusiastic about working with us. We are using a combination of software packages for each condition, and participants have been very positive about working in our small computer lab.

We’re looking forward to the chance that our cognitive training battery has positive effects on our participants. We are not only looking at cognitive abilities but also the effects of training on self-efficacy and mood.

Follow that? Metacognition is the idea that we can understand not only the content of our thinking, but the different processes that go into it. And understanding the ways that the default mode network and focused attention (both ways of thinking) interact are the subject of several interesting article.

The default mode network is a group of brain structures that become more active when someone’s attention is focused inward, thinking about what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. When a person’s attention is focused on the outer world, a different set of brain structures is activated.

A recent article in Neuroimage (click here for link) suggests that people who are less efficient in making the transition between the two sets of structures may be more creative. It’s as though the person’s internal world intrudes on reality. This finding has some appeal, because it helps us understand how creative persons can look at everyday life and see something radically different. It also helps us understand how someone’s unique individual vision can be so compellingly imposed on existing reality.

You don’t have to look very far to find examples. My personal favorites are Stanley Kubrick’s vision of the future in 2001, Fritz Lang’s in Metropolis, and the entire Dr. Who series from the BBC. Take an ordinary telephone call box, the vision of a sexy robot in the future, or a nghtmare of artificial intelligence, and extrapolate.

How do you apply this to your own brain fitness? Research shows that creativity, or at least its close relative, divergent thinking, can be taught, even to kindergarten-aged children. Jonah Lehrer wrote a recent article in the Wall Street Journal and a related blog post about the virtues of distractibility.

For optimal brain fitness, consider training yourself in divergent thinking.

In an article published online on January 31st in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers show again that regular walking can make a difference in cognition. This study is new because the researchers also looked at the volume of the hippocampus with imaging techniques and looked at BDNF levels.

Exercise and BDNF levels may also be related to the way that antidepressants work to reduce depression, and we know that for many individuals exercise improves mood. While we think of the hippocampus most often because of its role in memory, it also has important effects in regulating emotion.

You can find the abstract here. The full article is available to subscribers only.

Now another study shows that mindfulness meditation, even over short periods of time, can actually make a difference in how thick the gray matter is in some parts of the brain. Gray matter is made up of actual nerve cells. Other parts of the brain are the white matter (basically, the connections between brain cells), and other cells that provide a supportive scaffolding for nerve cells and immune functions.

The study shows that just 8 weeks of meditation training made changes in parts of the brain associated with memory (the hippocampus) and complex information integration (the temporoparietal junction).

You don’t need special equipment or even special training to get started with mindfulness meditation, although an experienced teacher may be helpful. You can download meditation training materials off the Internet in a number of sites (check out iTunes). A favorite site of mine is Zencast.org. You can download basic meditation training talks there (free), focused on Zen Buddhism. But you don’t have to be a Buddhist to do mindfulness meditation.

Reference:

Holzel BK et al (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191, 36-43. You can read the abstract here.